Tolino EPOS E-Reader Review

The brand new Tolino EPOS is an e-reader that has everything going for it. This device has a giant 7.8 inch screen and has the same comfortlight system found on the Kobo Aura On and is waterproof. The Tolino brand is big in German speaking countries and a viable alternative to the Kindle.

Hardware

The Tolino EPOS e-reader features an E INK Carta capacitive touchscreen display with a giant 7.8 inch screen and a resolution of 1872 × 1404 with 300 PPI. This is the first Tolino branded product that is larger than six inches and should be a boon for anyone who needs extra screen real estate to read ebooks. The screen is completely flush with the bezel, which makes interacting with the touchscreen intuitive and robust.

Underneath the hood is a Freescale i.MX6 1GHZ processor, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. You will get around three weeks of usage via the 1200 mAh battery. The Tolino Vision series of e-readers have consistently been waterproof and this is the first model of a new series that you can also read in the bathtub or take the beach.

Tolino EPOS has a front-lit display to illuminate the screen so you can read digital content at night. This is the second model from the company that employs smartlight that will change the color of the screen from cold white light in the morning to warm white light in the evening.

One of the drawbacks of the EPOS is that it does not employ the tap to flip feature found on other Tolino branded e-reader such as the Vision 4 HD. The software is also buggy, it often hangs for a number of minutes and you have to do a reboot. This occurred numerous times during our review, such as selecting our country and entering our WIFI password.

The EPOS is made of hard plastic and the back has the Tolino logo in embossed piano black finish. There is a status indicator light, Micro USB, power button and a dedicated button to initiate the glowlight. On the front of the unit is capacitive hardware driven home button.

Software

The Tolino EPOS is running Android and it is a heavily skinned version, which means you would never know it was running this operating system. You cannot sideload in your own apps, although there are some third party mod tools available to give you a vanilla Android experience.

You can set this device in many different languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and German. Whatever language you employ will totally change the menu options and the entire user interface.

The home screen comprises of the books you are currently reading and have recently added. The library menu is buggy right now, no e-books that you sideload on the device show up there, although books you purchase do.

Speaking of purchasing digital content one of the big selling point is that you are not locked into one specific ecosystem. When you initially setup the the e-reader and define what country you are living in you can establish what bookstore you want to do business with. There is an extensive list such as Thalia, Weltbild, IndieBook, Buch, Libris and many others.

There is an internet browser and the navigation experience is really solid. Many websites these days are optimized for mobile, which is a boon for e-readers.

The software is fairly polished, but there is no shortage of bugs. Hopefully Tolino will address them in a future firmware update. You can update the firmware from the settings menu.

E-Reading Experience

The overall reading experience is very solid. Changing the fonts, font size and alignment is very similar to the experience that Amazon provides. You have Bitter, Fira Sans, Source Sans, Publishers Font, Droid Serif, OpenDyslexic and Vollkorn as the stock fonts. There are three different settings to augment the line spacing, alignment and margins.

There are many dictionaries that allow you to lookup a specific word or you can install a translation dictionary. There are dozens to choose from, such as German to French, German to English, English to French and so on.

In the settings menu there are options to change the refresh rate of the e-paper screen. This is the only e-Reader we have ever seen that goes beyond the standard every one to six pages. You can do every 60th page or even every 100th page if you want. If you turn it completely off, which is an option, you can read for a very long time without the screen flashing when you are flipping pages.

Wrap Up

The Tolino Vision 4 HD is the only other new e-reader to be released this year and overall it offers more e-book reading features than the EPOS. The Vision 4 has the ability to not only connect up to a number of bookstores, but can be synced to a number of libraries and indie bookstores in Germany and the books are populated directly into the device.

The EPOS is a good investment at €229 and is worth it to upgrade from older Tolino devices, such as the original Shine. The large screen is great if you read lots of ebooks and the touchscreen is tremendously robust. If you live in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany or other countries nearby, there is a great device

PROS

7.8 inch screen
Page turns are quick
comfortlight system

CONS

Software is prone to crash
library does not work with sideloaded ebooks

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

I will have to check. When we unboxed it last weeks we ran a firmware update to the latest build.

Kai Hensel

Yes, please check. Because from what I’ve heard the problems were fixed with the latest firmware update. And a short frontlight comparison Epos vs. Aura One. Would be great. I was annoyed by the uneven lighting of the Aura. Does Epos do a better job? Thanks.

X Ray

Essentially it’s the Aura One for Germans. If you’re not German, I’m not sure why you’d want this instead. Better temperature control, maybe.

Albert

“In the settings menu there are options to change the refresh rate of the e-paper screen. This is the only e-Reader we have ever seen that goes beyond the standard every one to six pages.”

Kobo Aura One can be set to refresh once every 1 to 10 pages, or even once every chapter.

Yes, but this e-reader does that too, but they go like every 30th page, 50th page, 60th page 100th page etc.

Zunqiu Wang

so I see previous models allow direct collections uploaded onto Tolino and shows up exactly as groups of folders. Is it same?

Katariina

How does the Epos cope with pdf files? How is the reading experience of pdf-s compared to that on Kobo Aura One?

Mirko Adam

Three weeks ago I sent back the Icarus Illumina XL HD and bought the
Tolino Epos. In the first week I didn’t used it much. Then someone
released a tutorial how to get access to the Android 4.4.2. Since then I
have used it 1 hour a day for training with a self developed app. The
app is just a multilingual word trainer so it just shows text. Within an
hour I have to touch the screen about 400 times and so far it works
flawlessly.

Andrew John

Is there any way to read sideloaded books yet? I have a fairly extensive library of books from Humble Bundles and Storybundle, and would love to read on this thing. But if I can’t read those books, there is no point. 🙁

Any ideas?

Bjørn Tore Hoem

Is Google Play available on this device, so I can use Google Play books, Kindle reader and a Norwegian library read on it?

Hi Michael and thank you for answering. Then I suppose the Icarus Illuminate HD XL is the alternative. However I can see there are mixed reviews. Any other Android 6 based readers with an equal feature set you would recommend I consider?